Last Friday morning a group of young people gathered in the rotunda at the centre of the US Capitol in Washington. Three of them stepped forward, unfurled a banner and chanted “who will stand for the future?”.
Capitol police quickly intervened and the group said three people were arrested.
The three were members of a new organisation known as Get Free, which describes itself as a “Gen Z and millennial-led movement”.
It aims at mobilising young people in the United States against what it contends is “rising authoritarianism and supremacy pushed by the Republican Party nationwide and their political appointees in the federal courts”.
The brief demonstration on Friday in the rotunda marked the end of three days of action and civil disobedience by the group in Washington.
On Wednesday young activists marched from the supreme court to the US Capitol where they staged a sit-in protest on a nearby lawn for two nights.
The organisation said the protest came in response to what it said were recent supreme court decisions overturning race-based affirmative action in admission to universities, permitting discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community and striking down moves by the Biden administration to provide student loan debt relief to about 40 million people.
The Get Free activists urged members of Congress to sign a pledge “to make freedom and equality real”.
It said it wanted to issue a “generational call to action to young people”.
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Anthony Torres, communications director of Get Free told The Irish Times that the movement wanted “to repair past harms, remove ongoing barriers to equality and realise a future where freedom is for all”.
Asked if there were specific issues the group wanted politicians to pledge to address, Mr Torres said: “The pledge is just for them to use all their powers as a legislator to repair the harms. That, of course, encompasses all of the different attacks that are happening on our freedoms, whether it is attacks on our reproductive freedom, our freedom to learn, our freedom to be ourselves. We absolutely talk about that. But the pledge itself is just committing to repair the damage that this faction is doing, in order to make freedom and equality real.”
Nicole Carty, executive director of the Get Free movement, said “our generation wants to live in a country where equality, freedom and justice are real for all, no matter our races, backgrounds or genders”.
“This terrifies the supremacist faction and their handpicked Maga (Make America Great Again) justices on the supreme court and they are desperately working to preserve their position [and] power.”
“From Maga-run state legislatures, governors’ mansions and House of Representatives to their handpicked justices on the supreme court, a wealthy and powerful few are manufacturing lies and laws to take away hard-won freedoms, erase past achievements like those of the civil rights movement, and greenlight discrimination.”
“They want to control our lives, sabotage our futures and rule for themselves. But we’re on to them. After the final supreme court rulings this June, we are issuing a generational call to action, mobilising young people to come to [Washington] DC and demand our members of Congress show which side they are on.”
